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#66517: How to install and use ndiswrapper -- Transcript

Hello and welcome to the first edition of Linux Howtos. Every week I
will post a video to Youtube explaining how to do something in Linux.
This is an important project because there just is not enough simple,
easy to understand, and easy to find documentation for new Linux users
out there. This week we are going to be discussing how to use Windows
wireless drivers in Linux using ndiswrapper. There are not that many
native wireless drivers for Linux because wireless device manufacturers
tend not to release specifications to the open source community, so we
are forced to use Windows drivers and ndiswrapper. So the first thing
we are going to do is we are going to determine what sort of wireless
card we are using. So we are going to switch to a root user using the
$ su
command, and we are going to type in our root password, and what we we
are going to do now is we are going to run
# lspci
which should list all the devices connected to our PCI bus. As you can
see right here, this is my wireless card, the Dell Wireless 1390.
Another piece of information we are interested in is the device id and
the vendor id, so to get that information we are going to run
# lspci -n
again, this time with the -n switch. Looking at the analogous line,
which is right here, we see the device and the vendor id in this
column... it's the column with 8 alphanumeric characters separated in
the middle by a colon. If you happen to be using a USB device, your
device is going to be listed under
# lsusb
right here, and your device and vendor id are going to be in this
column. OK, so once you have written this information down, we're going
to open up a web browser, and we are going to download and install
ndiswrapper from source. So we are going to go to scroogle here, and we
are going to search for ndiswrapper and it should be the first result.
And I'm just going to zoom in the text a little bit so that you might
be able to see it a little better and we're going to go to download,
and we are going to download the latest version from source, the latest
stable version. At the time of this video, the latest version is 1.52.
So here it is. And we're going to save this to disk. I keep all of my
source tarballs in a directory called /usr/src and then I have a
different directory for every package. My directory here already exists
for ndiswrapper-1.52, if yours doesn't you would just click here to
create a new directory, and you would name it after the package
ndiswrapper-1.52. Anyway, mine already exists so I'm just going to save
this file here. It's a very quick download. So we are going to go back
to our terminal and install this. All packages that you get from source
should be built as an unprivileged user, so I'm going to switch back to
my regular account and I'm going to change directories to the
ndiswrapper directory,
$ cd /usr/src/ndis*2
and now we're going to untar this. We are going to do that using the
$ tar -xzf *
command. -x for extract, z for g-zipped file (you can tell because of
the extension .gz), and f for what file. Since there's only one file in
this directory we can just use a *. Now there should be a new directory
that was just extracted. So we're going to change to that directory,
and now for this next step you're going to have to make sure that you
have the development packages for your distribution installed. We are
going to run
$ make
The development package should include kernel headers, it should
include gcc(1), make(1), the entire GNU toolchain, standard libraries,
that sort of stuff. Chances are your have it already.
This just takes a couple of moments.
There we go, all done. We are going to switch back to root, because now
we are going to install this. And we are going to do that by simply
running
# make install
And it's as simple as that. We should have a working version of
ndiswrapper. The next step is to go back to the ndiswrapper homepage,
and we going to download the Windows driver for our device, so we are
going to go to Documents/Wiki, and we're going to go to the list of
cards that are known to work. Since mine is a Dell, we're just going to
go to the C-F list, and then I'm going to do a quick search for my card,
which is a 1390. There it is. As you can see, there are 2 possible
drivers here. The first one has a major security bug so we are going to
download this. I happen to have downloaded it already, because it's a
rather large file, but if I hadn't I'd simply click on it, select save
to disk, and then I would simply save it in the same directory that I
saved the original source tarball, which would be there of course, but
I've already done this step.
So now we have to go back to the console here. (Ignore this step...) So
there's our driver. We are going to make a temporary directory just to
deal with extracting this driver.
# mkdir temp
And we're going to move the .EXE file into the temporary directory,
# mv *.EXE temp
and we're going to change to the temporary directory,
# cd temp
here we go. Now, even though this appears to be a Windows Executable
file, it's actually just a self-extracting zipfile. So, in Linux here
we can simply run
# unzip *.EXE
and then the name of the file, and we're going to be inflating this.
All right. Here are all the files we extracted, so we're going to
change to the DRIVER directory. Of course, depending on what your
driver happens to be this may be a little bit different. What you're
looking for is you're looking for the correct .inf file for your card,
and it should be coupled with a .sys file. So now, we're going to run
the
# ndiswrapper
userspace tool that we just installed. If we just type in its name it
prints out a list of the available switches and what they do. So to
install a driver you use this first switch, -i and then the inf file.
So we are going to do
# ndiswrapper -i bcmwl5.inf
And there. Now we have installed the Windows driver into Linux. And the
final step is to run
# ndiswrapper -m
and what this is going to do is add an alias to a file in the /etc
directory that is going to associate this device, wlan0, with the
driver we are using, which is ndiswrapper. So at this point we should
be able to type
# ifconfig wlan0 up
and tada, as you can see the wireless device is now working. So now all
we have to do is run
# iwlist wlan0 s
and this is going to scan for available wireless networks. Of course I
don't happen to have any at the moment. But there you go, a quick and
easy way to install ndiswrapper on your computer.